Venison
A goblin robot of mesozoic origin reaches his long mechanical arm right across the highway.
You’ll need to drive by him several times before realizing that his mechanical arm is connected to a mechanical hand, which at this very moment is clenching the neighboring mountain by the throat and violently slurping out its innards.
Thousands of tons of pulverized limestone are shot right back through the robot's arm and into his undulating belly, where cement is eventually shit out beneath a corrugated tin roof and sent off to pave future parking lots in goblin strip malls beyond.
The million-year-old mountain will be leveled by the end of the decade. Soon after, the robot will starve off and die.
There’s a venison farm right beside it all. The deer there probably don’t live long enough to notice any changes to the skyline though.
The Alchemist
A royal trumpet sounds and the goblin alchemist rises from his slumber.
He checks his quaint little bedside clock and confirms what he already knows. Indeed, in the span of one digitally induced fever dream, fifteen thousand years had passed.
He looks out his tiny cottage window and sees what he expects to see. Behold, during his short lapse in consciousness, the world had become dark and formless and the sun itself was lost.
He invokes his isotopic tomography scanner, surveys the world at once, and reads what he already knows. Veritably, during his brief sabbatical, all life, terrestrial and subterranean alike, had ceased to exist.
He opens his scroll, wipes off its stray pixels, and selects a new miserable creature to temporarily inherit the earth.
Seeding the planet once more, our goblin alchemist turns the sun back on, sets his alarm for one epoch over, and returns to his slumber.
Soup Off
“Earth was a baking lifeless desert for 5 million years.” Or so the headline read.
The goblin architect shook his head. His childhood in Southern Pangea was hardly so sweltering.
“The global wipeout that ended the Permian era, before dinosaurs, wiped out nearly all of the world's species. Mass extinctions like these in Earth's history are usually followed by a "dead zone", a period of tens of thousands of years before new species crop up. But the early Triassic dead zone lasted millions of years, not thousands.”
This, the goblin architect supposed, was a gross exaggeration of his early years.
“The extra-long five million year dead zone was caused by screaming hot ocean temperatures in the tropics, making the land's forecast a scorching 140 °Fahrenheit.”
Perhaps it was a bit balmy, the goblin conceded.
“The team figured it out by collecting data from 15,000 ancient teeth. The conodonts, tiny teeth from extinct eel-like fishes, were pulled from two tonnes of rock in South China. They form a skeleton using oxygen, and the oxygen isotopes are temperature-controlled. By examining the conodonts, the researchers were able to see how hot it was millions of years ago.”
So that’s where my collection went, the goblin muses. Salivating with delight, the goblin sets his coordinates to a non-descript paleontological site, doubling as a discount wet market, in the Hubei Province.
Bounding through hyperspace, past, present, and future merge to a blur in the rear-view mirror. The goblin licks his lips. The perfect ingredient; 15,000 Prehistoric Eel Teeth will all but guarantee the goblin’s victory at this weekend’s Neighborhood Soup-Off.
Gliese 445
A puny village of historical insignificance finds itself under siege.
Behind the crumbling walls of this feeble little village, more a trash heap than a city really, we find the royal archivist.
The royal archivist races to the royal crypt, procures the history tablet, gives it a smooch, then ties it to the interstellar dirigible and cuts the cord. The royal archivist gazes with awe as the last spacecraft on earth disappears beyond the firmament.
The dirigible floats upward, through the stratosphere, through the piercing clutter of orbital debris, and into the warm black pool of space, bound towards the constellation of Camelopardalis.
Miles below, Goblin sappers breach the walls of our puny little village. The archivist is caught, tortured, tarred and feathered, and dumped in the village bog where he is most certainly devoured by ravenous crocodiles.
Forty thousand years later a cruiseliner performing a gravity assist maneuver off the little known star of Gliese 445 intercepts a deflated balloon with a tablet in tow.
The tablet is brought to the captain, who gives it a close inspection. Etched into ancient limestone with remarkable penmanship, the tablet reads:
“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”
The captain cannot read.
The captain’s formidable nose at once detects the fragrance of ancient coral, foraminifera, and molluscs embedded in this carbon-rich gift from space.
He scarfs the delectable tablet down in a single bite.
The Businessman
A goblin businessman of intermediate prestige demos a new line of kitchen appliances:
“See, its blades oscillate at four times the rate of your standard blending apparatuses. Those bad boys can chop through anything. Ice. Carrots. Bone. No problem,” says the goblin businessman of moderate sales acumen.
“Its rust resistant, too, so you don’t have to spend any more sleepless nights worrying about all those citrus smoothies corroding the bottom. Yep. Its stainless steel you see, last ya’ uh-thousand years without a scratch, heck, even the glass is break proof, that’s how you know this deal is platinum,” he adds. “It’d probably take over uh-hundred years for this bad boy to break down on yah. A hundred years – no warranty needed. And the plastic fittings? Those’ll last twice as long, more, three hundred years of use, easy. Of course, the nylon apron I’ve got on, that’s only got, hmm, thirty years left on the clock.
”But the plastic bag I’ll sell you it in, well, assuming it don’t get burnt up its looking at a solid thousand year lifespan, probably most of it in an ocean somewhere. Of course, this mall will be gone by then, probably only has seventy, eighty years left till a big quake splits this place right in two. And at that rate, California, well, figure its got a million or two years till it slides right off the shelf and into that Pacific. Course who knows if there’ll still be goblins running around buying groceries and blending up smoothies by then, could all be livin’ on Mars by that point.”
“Either way give ‘em three and a half, four billion years till the sun gives out and takes all the planets down with it. Won’t take too long after that for a couple’uh black holes to shred this whole galaxy to bits, much like this blender, and soon there’ll hardly be anywhere left at all. Thirteen trillion years give or take, and even those holes will blend each other up till there is no universe at all.”